16 THE TRAMPS- Gran Chaco

Novelty-alarm! Named after the inhospitable hunting land area of the Andes, “Gran Chaco” is not only a relaxed rocker ideally suited for heating up your private Schnitzelbeat parties, but also one raw gem of Austrian Pop culture dipping into the Incredibly Strange Music coolness of contemporary Pop music. Written by Hans Lang, the guy that also composed the famous “Mariandl” post-war Schlager and co-produced by Kurt Svab of Hubbubs-fame, nothing is really known about the identities of the recording artists involved. As no traces of a local stage-band called The Tramps exist in that particular era, and no connections to the German (“Am Missouri”) or Belgian (“Ali Tomahawk”) groups of the same name could be detected, it’s quite likely that Lang and Svab casted a bunch of Viennese studio-musicians to record this jazzy and brass-filled dance instrumental. However, with “Gran Chaco” these pioneers left us an outstanding vanguard vision of a self-contained alpine Jazz Pop sound – quite needless to say that this specific sub-genre creation was not fit to survive at all.